Did You get Beaten Up by The Google Penguin?

Are you tired of Google Penguin? Have you tried everything to beat Google Penguin? Do you think Google has a thing for funny animals? Well, me too, but we can’t give up, and need to have an SEO penalty recovery plan in place.

What is Google Penguin?

The Google Penguin algorithm was released on April 24 2012. Its main goal is to reduce the influence of those sites on Google that have created low quality backlinks so that their ranking can be improved in Google results. In addition, there are some other factors that Penguin takes into account. But links are the most important factor.

Importance of links

A link gives authority to your site. If the site that you link to is good then it gives your site more credibility. But if a small site links to your site then it will not count for much.

Still, if the number of links is large, then small links also count. This is the reason why, before Google Penguin, SEOs tried to bring as many links as possible to their site.

Anchor text is another important thing for Google algorithms. Anchor text is the underlined part of a link. So, for example, if a link to a fitness blog is given, the anchor text used is “Fitness blog”. This gives Google a hint that those people who search for “Fitness blog” would probably like to visit the site that the blog belongs to.

So, people started to take advantage of this by creating self-made links and using anchor texts containing phrases related to their sites. They created a large number of low quality links and found it to be effective, for a while.

Google Penguin was created to ‘check’ these low quality and self-made links. If the algorithm finds out that there is a large amount of untrustworthy links to your site, your site’s ranking will be reduced.

What can you do?

Penguin is just like Panda. It filters your site. This means that the algorithm is periodically re-run and sites are scanned with every re-run. What you can do is remove unnatural links from your site. If you can’t remove them by yourself, then you can use a disavow tool, and tell Google to not count them. If you successfully do the cleaning, you will regain trust with the Almighty Google.